Re: God's work week
- From: dkomo <dkomo871@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2005 09:15:45 -0700
anon1@xxxxxxx wrote:
>>apparently both the Hindus and the Babylonians were using the 7-day
>>week before the Hebrews adopted it:
>
>
> One more nail in the coffin of Mosaic myths as Word of God.
> Obviously the Hebrews simply inherited the mythology, and the 7-day
> week culture, from Babylon, and then reworded it just enough to suit
> their local variation of that culture.
>
And, surprise, surprise, the book of Genesis ended up with a 7-day
creation period, put there by whoever wrote the thing.
>
>>God did a rather slapdash job in designing the cycles of the sun, moon
>>and earth. If He had put a little more thought into it, a lunar month
>>would be precisely 28 days or four weeks long, and there would be 13
>>lunar months in a solar year. That would make the solar year exactly 52
>>weeks or 364 days long. Had God done this, calendar keeping would have
>>been a whole lot easier. Each year would start on end on the same day
>>of the week.
>
>
> That would have been an awful design. Children would have been locked
> into castes according to their birth day-of-week. Those born on Monday
> would never get to introduce their Daddy to their birthday-party
> friends, because Daddy was always at work because Monday is the most
> important day of the work week. Those born on the non-Sabbath day of
> the weekend would *always* have Daddy at their birthday parties, and
> *never* have a chance for a girls-only party. Those born on Sabbath
> would never be allowed to see a movie or get catered food at their
> birthday parties, or even takeout pizza or Chinese food or special
> birthday cakes, because nobody is allowed ot work on the Sabbath.
> Children born on the bad days would be jealous of their siblings
> born on the good days, causing increased rates of fratricide.
>
> The only advantage would be that nobody would ever be born on that
> utterly horrid day that happens only once in four years and
> consequently decreases the number of birthday parties by that factor.
> And the horror of having to explain to schoomates, when asked "when is
> your birthday this year".
>
> If the year could be exactly 7*52 + 1 days long, then there'd be no
> leap years but still the birthdays would rotate among the days of week
> to give everyone fair share of Daddy.
>
> It would be funny if the year were an exact multiple of 8 days, yet
> scripture had it divided into 7-day weeks. With the Moon's tidal force
> slowing Earth's rotation, eventually the day will be long enough that
> the year will be such an exact multiple of 8 days. Does anybody know
> when that will be? In the distant past, the Earth rotated faster, so
> there were more days in the years, so long ago another exact multiple
> of 8 days in year occurred. Does anybody know when the last such event
> occurred? It would be funny if that was coincident with some mass
> extinction event that cleared ecological niches for us humans to later
> evolve. If so, I could start a religion that claimed that Creation was
> exactly then, that everything before then was mere illusion, and the
> 8*n-day year was deliberately set up by the Creator. My religion is
> more ancient than even Hindu or Babylonian religion. The Dinosaurs were
> of my religion. :-)
> .
>
Well, let's see. As the earth's rotation slows, the days gradually grow
longer. We want to figure out when the day grows long enough so that
there are only 360 days in the solar year, which is the nearest multiple
of 8 down from the current solar year of 365 and a fraction days. This
would result in 45 8-day weeks in the solar year.
This link gives the rate of deceleration as 0.005 secs/year/year:
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CE/CE011.html
The length of the year in days has a number of different definitions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year
But I'll use the average length of the sidereal year of approximately
365.256 days. So the day has to lengthen by a factor of 365.256 / 360
to produce a 360 day year. This works out to an increase in day length
of 1261.44 seconds. At a deceleration of 0.005 secs/year/year this will
happen in 252,288 years.
The time in the past when the year was 368 days long (46 8-day weeks),
means the day was *shorter* by a factor of 365.256 / 368 or 644.24
seconds shorter. This happened 128,849 years ago.
All this assumes that the rate of deceleration has remained fairly
constant over this 381,000 year interval, which it probably hasn't. One
factor affecting the deceleration rate are the tides on the earth, but
the earth has undergone numerous ice age cycles in this period of time,
and the oceans rise and fall many meters during these cycles as glaciers
and polar ice melt or freeze.
--dkomo@xxxxxxxx
.
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